SMBC Comics Forum

[quote="Liriodendron_fagotti"]Isn't that always the goal?[/quote]

Honestly I prefer to just eat a bunch of food, drink some water, take a hot shower and go to bed. Then the next day I can lie to myself and say I don't really hate everything, it is just my hangover. Is it a problem that I get more escapism from the hangover than I do from being drunk?

[quote="Kaharz"]I think that is joke about the emergent property. At some n+1 the previously identified pattern no longer holds and instead of feeling better you end up face down in a pool of your own vomit in an alley.[/quote]
I just thought he was going start a housing development project in an alley. I didn't consider anyone could still do logic reasoning when lying face down in a pool of their own vomit in an alley.

Isn't that always the goal?

I think that is joke about the emergent property. At some n+1 the previously identified pattern no longer holds and instead of feeling better you end up face down in a pool of your own vomit in an alley.

When I was learning proof by induction I also initially thought that this was a flaw in inductive reasoning, until I finally learned how to do proof by induction right. You can't give a proof by just showing that the base case and the next case holds. Besides the base case you also need to prove that if [i]n[/i] holds, [i]n + 1[/i] also holds, [b]for any [i]n[/i][/b].

So to get a proof by induction that more beer always makes you feel better, you need to objectively prove that if I had [i]n[/i] beers another beer ([i]n + 1[/i]) will make me feel better. The mistake here is that this student thought that he had an inductive proof after showing he felt better after just two beers ([i]base case + 1[/i]).

If only he had done his proof by induction right, he wouldn't need so many experiments. Unless of course the goal of his research was to get as drunk as possible.